30 April 2006

I'm right on killer tout says McCord

THE brave father of a loyalist murder victim has called on the PUP to admit that he was right all along to claim the leader of a gang of UVF killers was an informer.

Raymond McCord says claims by two ex-CID men back up what he has been saying for years about the gang that murdered his son, Raymond jnr, in 1997.

Senior ex-CID men Johnston Brown and Trevor McIlwrath said a Mount Vernon loyalist should have been charged with the murder of Catholic Sharon McKenna (27) in north Belfast in 1993.

But Special Branch intervened and the paid informer and his UVF gang went on to carry out a string of brutal murders.

Mr McCord said: "I want a statement from the PUP admitting that I was right all along."

Brown and McIlwrath declined to name the UVF man who evaded justice as a Special Branch informer.

But last year, Irish Labour leader Pat Rabbitte used parliamentary privilege to accuse Mark Haddock of being the loyalist who escaped being charged with Sharon McKenna's murder because he was an informer.